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How to Write Talks in Order to See Changed Lives
Doug Schaupp 9~/98 UCLA Team
Draft #1
You all are taking tremendous risks to grow in teaching the Word.
You are listening to God, and he is putting his Word on your heart for his people.
You are stepping up to speak the truth, and you are calling for changed lives.
You are trying stuff that you never knew you could do.
Well done!
In turn, I want to do all I can to help you learn how to be faithful teachers of the Word.
Growing in this ministry is very hard work.
But God’s Spirit is in you, and He will guide you into maturity in your teaching.
Under His guidance, you will each develop your unique style according to your personality, your gifts, your ethnicity, your gender, etc.
You have my total permission to experiment and grow and evolve in your teaching.
To help that process, I am writing down some things that I have found helpful both in my own development and also in helping others grow in teaching.
However, if these recommendations are not helpful for you, please rip this up and throw it away.
Don’t give it a second thought.
The danger of writing down these ideas is that they become some kind of sick legalism that we have to stick to, even when it doesn’t work for us.
(By the way, these ideas are just for speaking to generally Christian groups.
I change some of these guidelines in my evangelistic speaking.)
Teaching the word well is a huge gift of servanthood that you are giving to God’s people.
I hope that this ministry that you are embarking upon becomes a life-long commitment and joy.
God is investing in you for the long run.
So please get used to teaching the Word in season and out of season.
God is very motivated to develop this ministry of the Word in you (I Cor.
12:28,31).
Please also have complete confidence in God’s power to work through his Word.
He longs to regenerate people’s hearts and to sanctify them through his Word.
Even as much as you want the Word to go out in power, how much more does God value his word going out in power!
The burden rightly belongs on God to make the teaching powerful.
As teachers, let us strive to be like Ezra.
Ezra didn’t just want to teach the scripture.
He wanted to wrap his life around the Word.
“For Ezra had set his heart to study the law of the Lord, and to do it, and to teach his statutes and ordinances in Israel.”
(Ezra 7:10) We must be consumed by the Word, putting it into action before we call others to obedience.
As we find our joy in studying and doing the Word, others will want to emulate our love for the Word.
A very high regard for the Word will get passed on through our teaching.
We want our community seeped in the Word, and we have the honor of raising the bar high in terms of how much we should love the Word.
I The Power of the Word
There is nothing that we will ever get our hands on that comes close to being as powerful as the Word.
The Word has the power to bring a dead heart to life.
Once the Word penetrates the heart, it regenerates and starts a fire.
It literally creates a revolution inside of people, and they often don’t know what is going on.
They just know that something amazing is happening, and that they are changing.
That is the good news.
The bad news is that Satan is the ruler of this earth, and he is hell-bent on keeping people from internalizing the Word.
He knows how powerful and revolutionary the Word is, so he snatches it every way he can.
He is an expert in keeping people stuck in self-deception, spiritual numbness, and general depravity.
James 1:22-25 is an excellent depiction of what we are up against.
We humans love to forget how broken and needy and disobedient we really are.
We get convicted from the Word how much we need to live it out, and then we quickly forget any feeling of conviction.
Satan snuffs it out.
So as we teach, we are trying to serve people who have an intrinsic tendency to ignore application of the Scripture.
“I’m doing pretty well in that area of the Kingdom”, is one of the most pleasing thoughts that can go through the self-deceived Christians’ mind.
The Word is still more powerful than Satan and our self-deception, but sometimes we only notice Satan’s work, not God’s.
Here’s how I think about it as I prepare a talk.
People are pretty open to God deep down at the core.
But there are layers of barriers, defenses, and armor up between our hearts and God’s Word, some put there by Satan and some that we have put up ourselves to protect ourselves.
There are elaborate rationalizations in place as to why we don’t need to change.
There is sin and unbelief that God would even want to work in my life.
I like to think of my challenge as a teacher as getting under one layer armor after another, so that in the end, the Word has hit them in their softest spot.
Then lives change.
I cannot change anyone’s heart, but I can serve the congregation in every way possible to make the word accessible and relevant to them.
Because our challenge is so complex, we must make it as compelling as possible to live out the Word.
We must persuade, exhort, motivate, and even twist arms to get people to live out the Word.
We must not allow ourselves to play into people’s natural tendency to merely enjoy the Word and not live it out.
Don’t be pleased just because people complement you after you talk.
Wait and see if people live it out to know if you have succeeded.
Our challenge is two-fold: we must show them the goodness and attractiveness of the truth in the scripture, and then we must show them how to get this truth deeper into their own lives.
Once they are honest with themselves with how much they need this truth, then they can get serious about changing.
For me, every talk is an opportunity to help people into a paradigm shift in terms of how they see themselves, God, and life.
I take my role as a teacher seriously.
The Word wants to change people.
I need to write talks and preach sermons with the expectation that each time I teach, I am helping people change their paradigm from the world’s perspective to the Kingdom’s perspective.
Life is short, and there are too many paradigms that need to be shifted for me to mess around.
Let’s teach so that people are compelled to change their lives.
Amen?
Let us also commit to humility in our teaching.
Though we take our role seriously and we think as hard as we can about how to serve people with the Word, we must always remember that only God can make the Word penetrate the heart.
We can give the most effective and well-written talk in the world.
But if God chooses to withhold his Spirit, no lasting change will come.
We must always pray that God fills our teaching with his Spirit.
Also, we need the humility to pray for God to guard our tongue from teaching heresy.
Teachers face greater judgment (James 3:1).
When we are teaching passages where the truth is clear and bold, we must be clear and bold.
But where the scripture is vague, we should let them know that we are only offering our opinion.
In summary, we need to have total confidence that one little Word from God can make all the difference in someone for the rest of their life.
We stand in awe, because the Word we are handling is radioactive.
When God calls us to speak his Word, we step up in total obedience and let God speak though us whatever he wants to (Jer 1:6-10).
He puts the Word in our mouth, and we speak it.
We are not responsible for the results, only God is.
This provides us total freedom from trying to get our affirmation and value from results.
II Visioning for your congregation
So how do we write the kind of talks that change lives?
Let’s learn from Paul how vision for people before we write our talks and give them.
Paul is one of the most effective teachers and preachers of all time, but we know it isn’t due to his eloquence.
Instead, he labored in prayer and reflection over how to best serve people in every different city he visited.
He masterfully constructed powerful and relevant talks that hit the nail on the head everywhere he went.
He studied his audience, and honored them by tailoring everything to fit them perfectly.
He adjusted his sermons to fit each new context.
He didn’t just speak on a passage because he was given the opportunity.
He sought out God and gave them the most relevant and useful message he could.
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